Angelo DiNardi

So lately I’ve been getting contacted a lot about MailWrangler. I have no idea why all of a sudden there’s renewed interest from users and journalists. I haven’t had time to respond to most people, sadly, but I’ll address some things here for everyone.

First off, chances are good I’ll never release MailWrangler. Originally the app was supposed to be my little entrance into iPhone development. I needed something simple to get acquainted with design, development, and distribution of iPhone apps. It was basically my “Hello, World” app. Of course, as the story goes, Apple rejected my app after taking way too long to review. By this point I’m already getting ready to head back to school where my time was only going to get harder to put into an app.

I’m not really mad at Apple, nor do I want to really make this a big deal. Its their App Store and they can make any rules they want. We knew the iPhone was a pretty closed system when we bought them and developers knew the App Store was going to be a pretty controlled place. We can’t say we didn’t see this coming; it’s Apple.

So where does that leave me? I don’t have much motivation to update MailWrangler to the latest SDK version (right now it compiles but won’t run… something changed) so I can’t even resubmit it. The app was just a little thing I threw together in a weekend, nothing big or special. Although I think it would be useful to have, even I don’t need it more than once every so often — the built-in mail app works well enough for my needs. Also, because of my issues with the App Store, it’s hard to put in effort on something that could just be rejected again. There’s plenty of stories out there and more all the time of people continuing to be rejected or ignored by Apple’s review process. It just isn’t worth my time to keep dealing with it.

Short story? I probably won’t be getting around to doing anything with MailWrangler again for a while. While I bet there’s a good chance I could get it approved eventually, it just isn’t worth my time right now (I’d rather spend it finishing out school so I can graduate in May, and enjoying those last months of college). And although I could release it via Cydia or other similar system — there’s a significantly smaller audience and I would still need to update the app to even work. Then there’s support and maintenance. Again, for me right now it isn’t worth it.

I think I’ll stick to web applications.

It seems like every time you just want to do some silly maintenance task you end up screwing something up royally well. A few weeks ago I accidentally fsck’d the running ext3 filesystem on this server, ignored the warning message it spit out, and killed the filesystem. That’s what I get for mistyping the /dev device and ignoring warnings. The problem with the fsck warning is that it was really easy to bypass. Given, that’s what I expect from a UNIX-ish system. 

There’s still plenty of things broken here and on the server as a whole. It’ll all be back eventually. Note to self: when the backup server fails, replace it sooner rather than never.

So lately I’ve been using the NBC Video Rewind service to watch TV shows online. It’s via the nbc.com website in a flash based player. The service is pretty nice and the quality is decent enough to watch tv.

Since they’re not just going to give away free video they ad support it via “commercials.” These are injected with commercial interruptions. I can live with that. Here’s the problem: it’s the same one for the whole episode. They’re ’sponsored’ by a single advertiser. There’s an ad at the beginning and sometimes 4 or 5 times during an episode for 30 second slices. All the ads I’ve seen are exactly the same for the whole episode. It actually gets really, really annoying after a while — especially when all the episodes have the same sponsor. I’ve seen a Superbad movie trailer + ad at least 15 or so times today. Do they think that is really going to help them? If you’re going to show me ads at least show me something different. At this point it’s a complete waste of their money to keep showing that ad to me.

Advertising is a fact of life if we want things for free. It’s a decent model too. I like to watch a lot of TV shows when I want to watch them without paying for cable service. And I like free because I don’t have the money to just dump on this stuff. But please, if you’re going to advertise — mix it up a bit. Showing me the same ad over and over simply irritates me.